Page 16 of Heartbreak & Cupcakes
SADIE
“DidI tell you my grandson is going to be visiting this weekend?”
“I think you mentioned it yesterday, Mrs. Flores.” And the day before that. And the day before that.
Note to self:Check to see if I had Dateless and Desperate stamped on my forehead.
That had to be the reason everyone and their grandma, literally, were trying to set me up. I made sure to keep a smile pasted on my face as I waited for Mrs. Flores to pick out which muffins she wanted.
Spoiler alert: it was going to be banana nut. It was always banana nut. But the process of her coming to that inevitable conclusion could take anywhere from five to fifty minutes depending on how many other customers there were. Mrs. Flores liked to let people go in front of her while she decided.
She was lonely. She was not only a customer she was also my next-door neighbor. She lived in the building as well. The second floor consisted of four apartments. Two of which had been vacant since I’d moved in close to a year ago. The other was occupied by Mrs. Flores who had lived there long before Mr. Wilcox acquired the building in the ’90s. On the first floor there were two retail spaces. One that I rented and housed Sweet Temptations and then the space beside it, which was vacant. I hoped it would remain vacant until I could come up with enough money to rent it and use it as a tasting room. Right now, all of our wedding cake tastings were done on one of the two tiny bistro tables that sat against the window. It was cramped to say the least.
And thanks to Bliss Bridal, the bridal boutique across the street, we got a lot of bridal traffic. Which was great for business from a monetary standpoint. Put “wedding” before anything and the markup was a couple hundred percent. But besides the boost to my bottom line, I just loved making wedding cakes. I loved being a part of two people declaring their love for each other.
I had to admit, sometimes during tastings I would get a twinge of envy watching the couples interact. Seeing them give each other private looks using a silent language that only the two of them spoke.
When most little girls dreamed of getting married, they dreamed of their wedding dresses or the venue that they would get married in, or the ceremony itself. Not me. As a little girl, I’d dreamt of being at a cake tasting with my husband to be. I’d set up a table in my room and arrange my stuffed animals in chairs. Mr. Bear was usually cast in the role of my intended. I’d sit next to him and pretend to feed him and myself pieces of plain bread that I would say were red velvet, or white chocolate, or marble fudge cake.
That should have been my first clue that opening this bakery was my destiny.
“Hmm, everything looks so good.” Mrs. Flores perused the glass case, putting on a good show of considering something other than the banana nut muffin she was ultimately going to get.
I was glad she was getting the calories since I doubted she was a hundred pounds sopping wet. I didn’t think she did much cooking anymore. From the looks of her trash, she preferred frozen dinners. I tried to bring her over a homecooked meal at least a couple of times a week.
A few months back she’d casually mentioned that before I moved in next door to her and opened Sweet Temptations, she’d go weeks sometimes months without anyone asking her how she was or taking the time to talk to her. She said that she’d felt invisible.
It broke my heart to hear her say that. No one should ever feel like that.
I’d encouraged her to visit the Bayview Senior Center. It was on the bottom floor of Bayview Assisted Care Home. I’d been giving them weekly donations of my perishables since I opened.
When my business was solely online, I’d only baked what I needed to fill orders. But now I had to have daily inventory that we rarely sold out of. Some of our baked goods could be reused, but there was excess that could not. I divided that inventory between a homeless shelter, a battered women’s home, and the Bayview Senior Center.
The senior center had a lot of activities. There were weekly game nights, different guest speakers, art, yoga and even dance classes. I knew that if Mrs. Flores actually went there, she’d love it. But whenever I brought it up, she pretty much responded to me the way I did to her whenever she talked about her grandson.
We politely blew each other off.
“I should bring Stanley in to meet you.” Mrs. Flores wagged her white brows. “He’s very good-looking.”
I kept smiling and did not reply. It was a new line of defense I was experimenting with. A friendly non-response.
If I said that I wasn’t interested—which I wasn’t!—then I spent the next thirty minutes on the stand defending myself in the case of The People vs. Sadie Burke’s personal life. In that scenario, nine times out of ten the ruling would not go in my favor.
Even when,especiallywhen, I told people that I was taking a dating sabbatical and explained the reasons for my self-imposed singledom; I was overruled. The well-meaning cupids always felt that they knew better than me when it came to what I needed in my life.
I wasn’t sure if it was because I looked much younger than my thirty-five years, or if it was because people mistook my niceness as weakness, or if I actuallydidhave Dateless and Desperate stamped on my forehead. Whatever the reason people always had very strong opinions about my personal life.
“You just haven’t met the right man.”
“Someone so pretty shouldn’t be alone.”
And my personal favorite, used by those who did know how old I was, “You’re not getting any younger, the clock is ticking.”
Why people felt the need to remind me, you know, like I wasn’t painfully aware of that fact was beyond me. Didn’t they know there was a constant tick, tick, tick running through my entire being? I certainly did not need well-meaning meddlers pointing out either of those facts. But still, I wasn’t a charity case.
I knew what people saw when they looked at me: a woman in her mid-thirties with no children, no partner, no family and they felt like they needed to fix me. Newsflash: I wasn’t broken.
Sure, life hadn’t gone exactly as planned, but I had a good life. A full life. And if I wanted things to change, I could change them.
